Getting an Audience is Hard!

“Getting an audience is HARD. Sustaining an audience is HARD.It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.” Bruce Springsteen. Bruce had to change his audience approach with his new Album Wrecking Ball and it worked as his tenth album topped the charts.

Newspaper circulation has dropped over the last 18 months. Radio is now competing with podcasts, and TV is seeking an audience who’s attention is spilt between a smartphone device and Apple TV or playback on an iPad. People are listening via Spotify rather than buying CDs. Jeff Rohrs has a new book Audience is out which talks about building a Propietary Audience (the subscribers, fans, followers, and other direct audiences that you can reach with the push of a button & instantly supercharge the distribution of a new piece of relevant content.”

“Proprietary Audience Development is a comprehensive, collaborative, and cross channel effort to build audiences that your company alone can access.”

“Audiences are all around you. They are direct, responsive, and extremely cost effective. They ’re also new, constantly evolving, and quick to anger if you cross them.Your company needs audiences to survive. If you aren ’t building, engaging, and activating proprietary audiences of your own, you ’re falling behind.”

Before we have customers we have audiences. What Jeff is ado vacating is that there are different audiences. Seekers, Amplifiers and Joiners. Having an approach to nurturing these audiences in a cohesive way is very important. They are now our biggest asset. Who doesn’t want to reach potential customers or supporters at a click of a button? They are our most valuable asset. They can leave any time they want. Most companies have been focusing on the channels of communication without having a comprehensive approach to the audience they are serving across these mediums.

According to an interview Jeff “the best content marketing is content that helps or provides a service to consumers. That said, I also think that the best content marketing isn’t focused on volume but rather value. Thus, brands need to identify the various personas they wish to serve with their content, develop accordingly, and survey to see if they’re satisfying their target market’s needs.”

Audience development requires a strategic approach. Using data and analysis to find out and determine the lifetime value of your audience and what they find valuable via analytics is a good first step. It is not about having masses of content but having content that converts or serves your marketing objective, brand development, attracts a new audience member.

“Marketing is now as much about determining where you shouldn’t spend your time and money as where you should. Accordingly, marketers are challenged to manage their own feelings of uncertainty and fear of falling behind. That’s one reason I wrote AUDIENCE—to provide a core marketing responsibility that transcends channels and changing technologies. Building proprietary audiences isn’t an idea that’s going away—it’s only going to become more important to marketers everywhere.”